education at the age of 17. in seventh is barbara ehrenreich's thoughts on the fear of death, natural causes followed by journalist peter sweitzer's report on the business deals made by prominent political families in secret empires. wrappingup our look at some of the books from the new york times nonfiction bestseller list , jeff benedict biography of professional golfer tiger woods and fire and fury, michael will expose of the white house. these authors have will appear on tv. you can watch them on our website, booktv.org. >>. >>. >> hi everyone. welcome. my name is robert hume and i'm the chair of the political science department at fordham university and it is my great pleasure to introduce my friend and

colleague nicholas tampio for what promises to be a very interesting and engaging talk about common core. nicholas tampio researches the history of political theory, contemporary political theory and education policy. he has earned degrees from new college florida, indiana university and johns hopkins university. professor tampio has been teaching since 2008 and is the faculty advisor for the chapter of five sigma outlaw, the political science under his eye. he's an accomplished scholar, has written peer-reviewed articles as well as three books, courage, and the book will be talking about today, common core, the national education standards and the threat to democracy. professor tampio's book on the common core has attracted a great deal of attention including radio interviews, favorable reviews in the wall street journal and reviews from prominent scholars.

william reese has the book is well researched, clearly written and thoughtfully presented and is a pleasure to read. young chow of the university of kansas says this book is a brilliant take on the problems of the common core and then any effort to impose uniform standards on all children, pothole, evidence-based and compelling, this should be a must read education policymakers and anyone concerned about the future of education. nicholas and his wife are stakeholders in this debate. they have young children and as a parent myself, i can say that we parents all benefit. he is dedicating his considerable talents to writing about education, join me in welcoming professor nicholas tampio. [applause] >> you mom it is nice to see many bright-eyed students for this discussion today. i'm glad bob mentioned

parents because that's really why i'm here. fyi did this friday on the common core so my story, in the fall of 2011, my oldest kindergarten and it was a great experience. the teacher was trained in montessori methods and they get a lot of hands-on activities so for one example, one thing they would do is take acorns and put them in water to see if they would float or not float and they would plant them in soil and grow trees and plant them in the neighborhood and meanwhile their learning about famous activists around the world who plant trees so it's this experiential, their learning about science . there are things where they would learn about art , how to do art in the style of a famous artist. so i live in marinette new york and norman rockwell used to live in march month so the students would learn about norman rockwell, learn how to draw like him, they learn to

read about him, to research and their learning also things about being aware that they are learning, part of the montessori method is you set children off with work activities and you just take notes quietly in the background about what they're doing well and what they need work on and so you don't need grades, you don't need tests but you are monitoring the child to make sure they are working so for the fall of 2011 i was just happy and kind of oblivious. and then in the spring of 2012, my wife gina, she came to me and said nick, there's been a big change in juliano's kindergarten class, you have to do something so i wrote to all the parents and said you noticed this change? we get the sense that something changing but what are you guys seeing? i got email back from parents and they were saying he was making them sit on the carpet and lecturing them. this is not what we sign up for, this is not what i want

for my own children live the letter to the principal and expressed the concern that parents have shared with me. and so i called into the principal's office. and we were talking and she was saying that everything we were doing was with the treasures reading program which was aligned to the common core. what's the common core? she said it's a set of benchmarks and in reading, writing and that will prepare all children for college careers in life and instantly, myradar went off . that's a ridiculous claim. there's this program you mentioned, i've never heard of it. and it turns out there's literally no track record for it. and how can anything prepare all children, college in career and life, especially when there's no track record so the image that came to mind was the first new row where the tailors tell the for a new row and everybody agrees it's beautiful.

and there's kind of this sense that there's a big cost being the first one to say it's the ever is needed but it doesn't change the fact the upper is naked so that was my guiding intuition and i became an education activist. i started meeting with parents and politicians. i started writing off for a lincoln post and the journal news and started getting talks around new york state including encouraging parents to refuse the common forecast and then i decided i'm trained as a political scientist so i said i really should use my training to delve into this issue and try to get behind the scenes.so the motivation as a parent but my skill set is as a political scientist. so the question that we should ask our, are the standards good or is the problem implementation because that's the first kind of question. is the implementation the

problem? the standards are the problem, should we try to do it again better western mark should we do a common core 2.0? and where moments where there are many national education entered in various stages of being implemented but there are national education standards in science, science standards, social studies, the c-3 framework . there's the national sexualityeducation standards . there standards on physical education and art we are really in this moment where there are all these education reformers are saying we need national education standards so how should we think about all these things. those are the questions i addressed in my book and my answer is that we should not have a common core. we should not do common core two and we should not have a national education standards in any of these other some things. in a big diverse country we should have lots of different educational models the cost

of national education standards outweigh the benefits. my argument is democratic in the sense that i believe ordinary people should have a say in how the schools are educated. that is a great way to learn about democracy, by participating in local schools. i sort of in jefferson, madisonian tradition of people should take charge of local affair so my argument is democratic and my argument is liberal back to john stuart mill on liberty, the chapters on thebenefits of different experiments of living , i think that people find satisfaction when they are choosing their own way, when they are taking a choice about how they want to be educated for their children want to be educated and there's benefits to diversity. so my argument is liberal and democratic and one way to think about is a garden. national education standards are all monoculture so all

across the country where going to have potatoes or across the country we are going to have weed and my question is why are we doing that? we should have a garden with lots of different flowers. we should have jesuit education, traditional education, john dewey education, vocational education. teachers fired up by a topic in particular, they should have an opportunity to teach back to their students. the image i want us to have in mind is a garden. lots of different options for parents communities and children. so let me go through the arguments a little bit more systematically. first, what is the common core? it's standards in reading, writing and mathematics. what a standard does is says at the end of each grade, a student should be able to know or do this in various subjects so if you go to the core standards website, you can go through all the standards and what they will

say is by the first grade, should be to do this or that in reading or writing and one of the arguments is that scaffolded so it builds up over time so that the expectations ratchet up as you go through the educational system. and if you go to the website, part of the synonyms for common core standards are the college and career readiness entered so the argument for common core and other national education standards is they promise to systematize, organize the education system so you're not going to be wasting effort. you're going to be focusing on the key things. reading,writing and arithmetic. and if they are well-designed, they are going to prepare all children for college . citizenship and life. so i'm going to acknowledge

there's a good argument for national education standards and in 2009 and 2010, nearly every state in america adopted the common core and even states such as texas didn't adopt common core, cities within those states adopted the common core. one of the things i do is i show the various ways common core influences people who are not even in the system. even homeschoolers and the private school kids are sort of affected by so if you look at the maps, every now and then on the internet you can find maps of places that have common core. nearly the entire country. virginia, texas, minnesota are a littledifferent but they are similar in many respects . the great argument by that i addressed for the common core is the opportunity . common core promises to close the opportunity gap if you look at scholars like linda

darling hammond, she will say in the suburbs have a thinking curriculum and in the urban areas they have a vocational curriculum and thinking is why having the common core, you can bring everybody up to the thinking curriculum so this will benefit the least advantaged. it will benefit students who have traditionally been affected so it's an equity argument or a civil rights argument . and hypothetically if the standards are well-designed, they will hold its top students even higher . so it's a hypothetically a win-win situation . so when you look at the common core that was first rolled out, there was high support. a lot of people supported the common core when it was mostly the promise but then over time, popular support or the common core dropped pretty significantly so according to one education poll, 83 percent of people who felt confident about stating an opinion, supported

the common core in 2013. 83 percent. in 2016 it was 50 percent and then educators , teachers, initially were very supportive and their support really went down. so somehow there was the sense in which it was not living up to its promise. maybe my image of the first new role was the light right way to describe what was happening to what is the problem? why did support for the common core drop. >> here i'd like to go to some key ideas from james madison. james madison was a long time author of our constitution. he wrote the federalist papers which are the documents that provide philosophical foundation for the constitution and i'll give you two quotes from james madison that are helpful. liberty is to action what air

is fired. and what james madison means by this is that if you live in a free society with liberty, you're going to get people to disagree with each other. you're going to have factions. so just as air, you leave the fire, freedom and lead to disagreement so liberty is the fashion what air is the fire. so one ofthe things i discovered when researching this is that people disagree about how to teach math . >> people disagree about how to teach reading and writing. people disagree about the science, you can go all through these standards and you will find three well-educated people who know what they're talking about identifying problems from their perspective with the national education standards.

so what you're doing with the nationaleducation standards is your removing the liberty a lot of people who don't have a say in the educational system . you see a lot of alienation and a lot of resentment they say i want my kids to learn this map this way and somehow basically , there am backroom dealings. bill and military met with gmail and david: and the gates agreed to fund common core and now all of a sudden the whole country as the education standards that some people would rather not have left one of the common arguments. another one here is from federalist 51. and the argument is the ambition must be made to counteract ambition . so part of the way america's constitution was designed is that we divide up our and also some ways, that we have this might be familiar but the presidency, we have the presidency, congress, judiciary. we have the state level, the local level and the fact is

that certain powers are redundant and that thinking is that you don't want to make anyone fashion in american politics to powerful . you want to divide power that say, you have a president, the governors can resist the president. the constitution was designed for that to happen. and so the fact is that article 1, section 8 would be the place in the constitution where they would enumerate education as a federal power. they don't. says that enumerated powers belong to the state people. let me be clear. i don't think a legal argument willbe sufficient. that's not the argument i want to make .i want to go back to the reasoning is massive and thomas jefferson did or decentralizing power. because part of what makes american systems work is that we distribute power and when you concentrate education power to decide standards, you're going against that constitutional framework for

reasons that are important. >> okay, so i've hopefully given you some good arguments for national education standards. a systematize things, the closer the opportunity gap and i've given you some negative arguments that they alienate people from the school and they go against america's constitutional framework. so we got pluses and minuses. how are we going to decide between these arguments to mark your the methodology that i do. first, i read the standards. and then, i look at how the standards are being implemented. for my book, i spent time looking at common for homework and looking atcommon core tests . and spending time on social media and listening to what parents and kids and teachers were saying about the common core.>> once you've done that side, you go back to the standard and you can reread them with a greater appreciation for what kind of

education they lead to. >> so standards, then go to the reality, back to standards no idea, so blackboard, real-world, blackboard. and one way to think about it is like shoes. somebody could get up issue and essay shoes got four inch heels and you're going to win every race that you run so who knows? you put them on and you say i can't run for nothing in the shoes and you go back and say there's a reason we don't have four inch heels for running shoes. might have sounded good abstractly but when you put it into practice, you come back and say maybe this was not the best idea. that's what i want to argue. at the standards on the homepage, you have to see what they are like in the real world and come back and see the standards to see how they are implemented . the most important common core standards, first anchor standards for language arts

reading, first ela anchor standard, here's what the first anchor standard says. should be able to read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it. despite specific textual evidence to support conclusions drawn from the text so for me, that part, site-specific evidence is the most important part of the standard. so then i look at that standard, then i read about the standards and the person who actually wrote one way or another these standards was a man named david coleman, he's the so-called architect of the common core. he's the lead writer of the ela standards and he would say things like students need to learn how to answer questions given text

dependent and text specific answers. text dependent, so they have to be from the text. text specific, they have to be the exact words from the text. and then what i would do is i would look at common core assignments? and what you often find is that students are given a passage of text and they are asked questions about the text that they have to answer using exact words on the text . so they have to buckle, they have to click, they have to circle, theyhave to write the exact words on the text . you're not allowed to use sevens. you're not allowedto go beyond the four corners of the text. you have to use exact words from the text . so for my book i looked at the engaged new york, new york state education department, i looked at the new york state common core tests.

i took the sat. the i did take my spent time. i did the parks desk, i did curriculum by pearson, core knowledge, mcgraw-hill and what you keep seeing over and over again are the exact same assignments where kids are given a passage of text, informational text and they have to provide evidence, is the first anchor standard and standards two through nine are the specific spate of questions about what kind of evidence from the text you are looking for. so it's extremely formulaic. and it's consistent, so this is not an implementation problem, this is your doing the common core anchor standard as interpreted by their lead writer. so now i think we got the clue to look to see what it means that other academic subjects aligned with the common port.so, in court, the next generation science

standards that you print up, they almost all, on every page there is a common core connection. there's a box and pretty much every time one of the connections is the first ela anchor standard. so maybe you can sort of anticipate what common core or what next generation standards are to look like. you passage of text about science, you have to answer questions using exact words from the text . e3 framework for social studies, see where i'm going with this? you're going to get half of social studies andanswer questions about the text . this can all be done on computers so i don't think it's partly the story about how schools aregoing moving more and more towards computer-based education or competency-based education . the advanced placement program, and even fallen when from writing the standard to the head of the college board, he aligned all the

boards programs to common core so sat, all the advanced placement programs, i'm sorry i'm repeating myself but there's a reality.you take the test, you are getting the document-based questions, you have to write essays, five paragraph essays using evidence from the text, you are supposed to use five out of seven documents or something like that. that's what it means to say that something is aligned with the common core. so why is this the case? why did david: write these standards? sometimes in the secondary literature you will see people say because of new criticism and this was a little literary theory method is on the el university in the 1950s that focuses on reading the text carefully. i don't mind theory because david: virtually never mentions it . most states adopted the common core as part of race to the top so the obama

administration ran a competitive grants program he states a certain amount of money if they want one of these grants 500 points, the state gets 70 points on the application to college and career readiness standards, and online assessments. so the common core and the testing work together. so like you is the common core tests were designed with common core standards were designed to testing mine. so the common core is the capital. and i just described, the exact words from the text, that allows there to be computer grading. however there the computer testing. because if you have synonyms, it's throws off the algorithm. >> you use words from outside of the text, it throws off the algorithm. if you require students to use the exact words fromthe text, the way computers and rehab writing , if you just tell them the correct answer

is going to use these three words from the text, they can figure it out. so that's my explanation of why the common core is close reading and all these other standards are aligning with the common core. so what's wrong with getting evidence from the text? a lot of students in his room and you guys give me evidence from the text but here's what i would say. that giving evidence from the text is a small part of the educational endeavor but there's a huge problem when you make it the sole focus of education. there's always other than skill sets that education should be exposing you to and if you make education about citing evidence from the text you're going to destroy the educational process what common core is doing is you have to read words from the text, you're telling kindergarten you can share

your own thoughts. about what you are reading. you can't make a connection between what you are reading and what's goingon in your life. you can't make connections to what's going on with your parents,the community . the whole focus is the text . then as you keep going through, you keep up that process. i had friends who are grieving the removal of poetry from the seventh, eighth grade curriculum. the friend was saying that young women, they might read poetry inseventh and eighth grade and now that's being cut. through the curriculum you're removing opportunities for students to exercise their own voice . what you're happening in america right now is that really wealthy families are sending their kids to private school where they are doing holistic education that encourages the child national interests and public schools, you're getting what john

dewey was fighting a century ago. the 3rs mechanically treated. that was john dewey's phrase. that's what's happening right now. the three r's mechanically treated. your learning to read, write, math and you're out. it's a wayto control teachers. it's a way to replace teachers. it's a way to make sure the kids are not growing up to be rebellious . so what's the alternative to common core close reading? for me, one of the beautiful texts is john dewey's the child and the curriculum. john dewey's theory is we find out what interests the child and you harness that interest to pull them to the forefront of human knowledge and hopefully give them incentive to go beyond. if there's a kid who likes sailing, what you do is when they are little you let them build sailboats out of what's

called popsicle sticks. you let them float them down a stream and you take them out on sailboats and as they get older, you let them apprentice with sailors and maybe they can goon a trip . what you're doing is constantly going up higher and higher and making the material come alive for students . if you are in a sailboat, you need to learn math. now you've got areal-world reason to study math . so children want to learn. i think my view is people want to learn and that spark gets snuffed from a lot of people so my view is i prefer to do things that empower the teachers to look at the students in front of them and figure out how to make education interesting for the child. my view is that i should have the right to argue for this in my community. i would like to go to the

school board and say i think we should do more experiential activities. i think we should do more field trips, less standardized testing. i think in a democracy, james madison, thomas jefferson viewpoint is that this should be my power to do this and other people's parents to be able to do this. so here's a criticism that came from the wall street journal review of my book. they said that's a good view for scarsdale. so the wealthy suburbs. but it's not a good view for the urban kids who are not learning to read. so you're seeing this from a very privileged position but you're not announcing the fact that local control can lead to kids not being able to learn how to read and we should do something for them . how do i respond to that? what i do is i tried to listen to, i do listen to parents in places like baltimore, chicago and detroit and all these places that are arguing or local control so it's not just a

rich white thing. it's that parents from all different communities what a say in how kids are educated. they want to say about what kind of specialty play schools are going to be in theircommunity . i think people are hungry to have a say in education. >> so i'll just wrap up here with my two main reasons why i think we should have local control and move away from national education standards. first, pedagogical. i think that when you have a say in your education, you're much more passionate about it. >> when you're a teacher and you get that to choose the menu, you put your heart and soul into it. when you were a student who gets assay about what kind of projects you're going to do, what kind of focus for the year is going to be or for the month or somehow, i think that makes kids want to learn better. so i think pedagogically, bringing power down to the

lowest level possible is beneficial. >> and the second argument is political. that participating in the local schools is a great way to enter politics. running for school board is often the way that politicians first get case for elected office. jimmy carter started off at a local school board and political science has shown that the further along estate moves, along the education forum pathway, parents become alienated from the process. >> they don't have a voice in the decisions. they don't want to participate in the small decisions. some have a say about the curriculum, they're not going to want to volunteer for the pda. not going to want to show up in school. they're not one to run for school board and it's also the case that if they're not able to participate in the school, they are less likely to participate in the community.less likely to run for local office or to vote or to do areas other things that can be measured to gauge civic participation so my view is that national

education standards harm democracy. and that if you believe in democracy, youneed to fight the common core , thank you. [applause] >> so yes. >> thank you. so one argument of national education standards, such as wendy darling hammond is that national education standards have been vocally successful. linda darling hammond sites singapore, japan and finland, showing that the opportunities have close, they have higher quality teachers and the students in these countries have way higher test scores in the united states so my question

is are people like linda darling hammond wrong in assuming if this works, national education standards works, it will work here i'll just restate the question. the young man was saying linda darling hammond observed that countries that have national education standards go in but he's arranging these is an international test , administered by the oecd every three years. between science, reading and math. and it seems international standardized test. that's highly regarded. it seems to me that if you, with national education standards you should be to move up the ladder. somebody like arnie duncan, that's really important. somebody like jeb bush, that's really important. all around the world there's people waiting with a breath about those for so it like australia, one of the former resident prime minister's was saying that one of australia's objectives was to be a top five pisa country.

how much should we care about pisa? is that the race we want to run for mark my view is that we absolutely should not run the pisa race because one when the colonists talk about opportunity cost, every time you do one thing youcan't do something else . if you say listen, we're going to focus on the skill that will be tested on pisa, what you're doing is your narrowing the curriculum to those. those tests, those skills tested on pisa. one of the things i do in my book is i took the pisa test and looked at the skill set and so i was reading about the science test and one of the things they said is the pisa test is not going to look to see if you memorize the names of flowers. we don't care if you memorize the names of minerals. it's primarily problem-solving so when you take the science test, a lot

of clicking and dragging and puzzles and just mind challenge games which are fine. kids like thosethings. pisa test is fun. it's a pleasant two hours, that's how long it takes . but you don't learn any science. so if you say we're going to gear our science education preparing for pisa, you're not teaching the kids science. you just feel that could be measured under the standardized reading, all the tests, you take one of my classes, you will be lucky if you take the loss of these tests but some of the things i like how to read instruction manuals or how to fill out a form or how to do real-world application reading. you say okay, those are valuable skills. should we introduce kids to harry potter?

should we be teaching kids to journal? should we be teaching kids poetry? there are these wonderful things being cut if you focus on the pisa test. i look it this university of kansas student and he says he wrote a book called why china had the best and worst education system in the world. they have the best of a rock on standardized tests but they have the worst education system in the world because they are not nurturing all these other are what lead to entrepreneurship or great artistry or inventions or helping children and that matters to me. >> hi, professor tampio. one of the things i'm passionate about his health education and specifically child obesity. children's health in this country. so as of right now, only about half of states require that schools offer health education and only about half of those require that it be accurate so right now we

don't have any health education standards in this country. do you think that's okay? >> that's a great question. there's a real problem. you and i are going to acknowledge there is a real problem that children aren't exercising enough and there's too much obesity. what's the best way to handle this? i'm friends with a pe teacher in california and we are twitter friends and he is, the word is apoplectic upset about the national physical education standards because they are now going to emphasize conceptual understanding . i apologize if this is the fifth time i've done this today but what's a pe class going to look like? you're given a passage of informational text and you have to answer questions about pe.

we're on the same wavelength, right? here's part of mycritique of national education standards. a lot of people like national education standards because they think their side is going to be the one writing them . but the problem is, it could be somebody you absolutely disagree with who could be writing the national education standards. some people believe that pe class should be leader learning about biology and anatomy. there's a place for running and jumping and being physical and enjoying thatand being exposed to that side of the human experience.what i would argue is , what i think is keeping a local thing. if you are in your community and you go to the school board and you say our kids need exercise. there's a school district in long island and they've double the amount of recess.

there's an argument for local control. i do believe inphysical education. i do believe in the problems you identified but i don't think the national education standards right now are the solution . thank you. >> my name is dane simmons and i was lucky enough to be educated in a private school so i did montessori stop . common core is still punishment on the sats. the question i have is how do you think something like free education, private school vouchers but for the government would lead to more equity and like their education for every child. i think that countries should have a serious discussion about choice . and right now, i think a lot of it is taking pot shots at betsy devos and i don't think that's a productive exchange. let me just give you a little image that i'm using

my political science class about the politics of education. ithink about the 2 x 2 grid with the left and right , then topping centralizing control and the bottom being decentralized control. what you have in america is the democrats and republicans, leadership, big-money supporters in favor of national education standards at the bottom right you have the tea party group that really wants local control and maybe free-market options. the bottom left, i think you have the ravaged mass, the network for public education. more local control for democratic reasons. for me, or the bottom where i see myself on the bottom left, sort of on the john dewey side is that i think there should be lots of different options. for schools. there should be lots of differentthings and there should be montessori options and iv options, i went to an iv program . i value those kind of things.

part of the question is are vouchers and charters the best way to do that. >> i think the voucher and the charter school debate would be more interesting if they were not aligned with the common core. just as a sociological phenomenon, the charter school movement has gone full support of the common core. and for me, that's the purpose because part of the promise of charterschools is your opening up different options . so that's just where things stand right now for me vouchers and charters could be interesting but right now they are not interesting enough . >>. >> some specific examples you mentioned, the sin problem and the lack of poetry. it seems to be humanity face my question is you believe children's humanities, reading and writing, are those by the policies you described?

>> one more time? >> children's interest in reading and writing in schools, are they going to lose interest? >> let me be a little bit more precise about what i value. i do value humanities and poetry and theater programs and creative writing. all that is important but sometimes people draw the contrast between common core and personal narrative where you tell your own biography, all about your childhood. and that's a ridiculous dichotomy. and the fact of the matter is that when you do research, you have to use discretion about what you are going to research. if you are ascientist, you should be able to read books beyond what you've been assigned or this particular assignment . so when i was an international baccalaureate

program, i wrote a 30 page paper on the italian involvement in the spanish civil war. it wasn't me just telling you what i thought, i was reading of different text . part ofthinking is making connections . so reading something and then making a connection between another class or reading something and saying that next or when you're reading came, you think high so that's what we were doing in class. the fact is that thinking. that's the kind of education that i think is important. matters for science education, history education, it's really across the curriculum that you should empower students toresearch and follow their intuition about what's important . >>. >> there's a place for

national education standards in the education system or should a curriculum enhanced and eagerly localized? >> your dilemma. so it seems reasonable to say can we just make minimum standards to make sure that kids are reading or that kids on track? so maybe we really parent down. and the thing about it is that any minimal definition is going to be incredibly controversial. i'll give you examples here. rudolf steiner, waldorf method. they say it's fine if kids learn to read when they are seven or eight . that rudolf steiner was much more important, that they did things with their hand and appreciated basic symbolism before they started to read. and so if you just come up with a national standardized test, that says we're just

doing minimal things, sure kids are on track to read and we will ensure that five and six-year-old are on track to literacy. basically you're saying that steiner method can't work. that steiner methods kids will get published as though no local school can do the steiner method. >> the point of that is the basic minimum stuff is still the subject of dispute. >> the second issue is from. one of the controversies of common core math, there's something called format practice and these are the philosophical principle of common core. one of the things i learned from writing this book educators differed between how to balance procedural mastery conceptual understanding, procedural mastery is just getting the right answer. just getting, being given a math equation and getting the right answer.conceptual understanding says well, you can go through the motions and not understand, you should be able to define your

terms and you should be able to show your work, to show that you understand steps by which you came back. sort of like metacognition. >> .. that seems to be a problem. on the other hand, there seems to be some good arguments for showing your work and understanding what you are doing. my view is why should we have one answer to the question? why should we put all of our eggs in one basket? maybe it's the wrong basket. we really won't know about pedagogy for decades if it works so i'm going to risk putting them all in one basket? here's the cost. you were alienating pairs from the schools because now they're saying i don't have a say in my

local school. i can't tell, there's nobody in my zip code who i can tell to sow set would rather have different math education for my child. that's a really have a cost to bear. i think that cost outweighs the benefits. that's my take. >> my question is, earlier this semester i read an article by robert putnam, and in it he basically notes that the level of participation among the american public has declined in pretty much any way measurable, less pte or scripture any type like that and is basic conclusion is that for a various amount of reasons including technology and the movement of other groups in the workforce, america has lost a degree of social capital and community-based organization and italy to be one's neighbor and communities are not for me as

quickly. so do you think the education system is like a symptom of that or something like large? do think, court embodies the issue and if we were to go back to local school, like idea, do you think that would maybe help this issue do think it's a larger cultural society issue. >> that's a great question. social capital is when you talk to other people without really a purpose in mind but you're just being friendly with them. if you're in a a billings lakeu chat them up. if you wouldn't professor to come to class and you just chatting with each other, you're building social capital. if you're volunteering at a league of women voters your building social capital. his point is by all sorts of measures americans are generating less social capital that the world war ii generation, they love to volunteer, that number just keeps dropping and dropping and it seems that's important for democracy to trust each other, to know each other, to like each

other. so how does that relate here? i would say the common core is part of a larger education reform movement, larger education reform movement thinks that expert should be in charge and not local parents. and the concrete consequence of that is that you're going to have less opportunities for social capital. so when i was teaching it to do politics this semester, one morning i was just discovering that kentucky was thinking that reducing its number of school districts by more than half, and as a political scientist what i care about is that's going to be lot less members of the community who can run for school board. that can be a lot less meetings for parents to yell and to screen and to tell the superintendent what's up, like sometimes we see the yelling and screaming for democracy but we don't see the beneficial consequences of it. i wrote an essay called, well,

it's about democracy basically defending democracy and saying that this education fight really brings home the importance of democracy. i think we need to bring back as much local control as possible. i'm a little bit disheartened in the sense you can't unscramble and eight. once you get rid of the school board, it's going to be hard to put them back. we've got our work cut out for us but i think just to pull it together, i think local control is a great opportunity to build social capital, great for democracy and 72 figure out ways to reinvigorate that tradition. >> we are all here at a college, and i'm wondering looking ahead, so we seen how the common core has been applied at the public

school level, secondary school level. do you see this coming to college and do you have any anxieties about that? >> yeah, no. yes, the common core is coming to higher education, and something called convergence, and so one of the things that race to the top program did is you get points are very stinky. one of the things they incentivized states to do is get a commitment that the institutions of higher education would not require students are graduated from the public education system to take remedial classes. all right, so often at state universities, freshmen have to take remedial math. and so the comic was going to vote unquote solve this problem if you graduate high school with a comical degree you could start by taking a credit bearing course and mash, english when you got to college.

it really is the tail wagging the dog, now all of a sudden this bill for k-12 is affecting higher education. i think that they're going to be more and more effort to try to link up with the systems and ty to make a convergent system that sometimes i think one of the cutting edges of education reform. report of k-16. now they're talking k-20. so k-12, k-16 for college and now k-20 but is actually p-20, preschool. trying to build a synchronize system. so to my knowledge nobody has yet required college professors to do common core course reading, but i don't think that's going to be an impossibility, but the exact take to convergence, the exact

form to convergence is going to take we don't know but i know for certain there are plans to implement that. thank you. >> do you think powerful teachers unions are roadblock to education reform in america? >> so the teachers, i support the idea of teachers unions. that john to help support teachers unions in your city and then the note, when teachers at tenure come with images they can't be fired without due process. so that makes it harder to fire a teacher. so they can get fired but it makes it hard to fire a teacher. a new york you see teachers active against the common core. in states that a right to work without teachers unions, you don't see teachers speak up

because the superintendent can just fire them for any reason, can fire them for insubordination which means criticizing school district policy which means criticizing the common core. they unions have place. i'm very disappointed with a lot of communion leadership that the bill and melinda gates foundation, they pay for the writing of the common core. they also gave a great deal of money to the nea to support the common core. there's a teachers union had a new york city who said that teachers wrote the common core,, which is false, and he said he would punched punch in the facy try to take it from teachers. like, what are you doing, guy? google who wrote the common core. core. what are you doing? so i support the idea of teachers unions, but right now they've not been a benefit to paris.

some really i mean, i wrote my book for parents. i'm trying to mobilize parents. they are the ones who can do things, although there are a lot of teachers who see problems with the common core, too. >> so obviously not all parents are experts in pedagogy. do you see any problems come any potential problems with parents maybe writing curricula or worked with teachers to write curricula that might have faulty information on correct numbers? >> the question is, i'm arguing for local control and the question is what is teachers can what appeared to what they're doing a what if they choose a really bad curriculum. to answer this question i go to john dewey, the public and its problems. the book is really addressing the question of what the role of experts in society, and his point is that expert should listen to the people, come up with ideas, and then bring them back to the people for sort of,

to see how they are. the image uses of the issues that people don't experts expet kind of shoes they want. expert design issues and the come back to the people. they people tried that and say whether the shoe fits or not. what i would say for something like curriculum is you don't necessarily require school board members or parents or teachers to invent something out of nothing. the fact is a community can choose from among expert options. the fact is if you've got a really bright person who's got this, spent a lifetime studying lets a science education, and in the olden days been decoded go to school district and code district by district to get each district to sign up. now there's one-stop shopping. you get this take to adopt the site standards. every school district in the state has the same science standards, so maybe there are some advantages but there are also some disadvantages.

now it's going to be very hard for an entrepreneur to come in and make that option available to people. i would like school districts to have a range of expert created options. that's my view about education. that's not anarchy or common core. you can have a range of different options but there might be a hard, sort of a challenging point within your question, which is what if the school district a mistake? and for me i think that's what living in a free society means, that school districts could choose a philosophy of education that you wouldn't want for your own children. but the alternative is that one group gets to decide for the whole country everybody is going to learn science and are pretty severe problems with that. >> my question is kind of i guess piggybacking on an earlier question about, like the grading of other countries, have a great

high than the united states. i hear this point a lot and like, i'm split between them because numbers don't lie. i wonder like is this a problem with health care and other issues? it's hard to compare different countries for various reasons? do you think may be reason why it doesn't fit to compare united states education policy with like that of european countries is maybe something like culture or size a country, like it's much harder to have health care system for such a diverse the large conjoined to turn were simply sex which will or a small country and a very homogeneous country is a lot easier to national standards were as with a lot more different variables to think about and also just comparing different cultures because we are built on freedom and not other countries are necessary. so we might prefer to rank lower where we have a choice to say aye want to learn with this

curriculum as opposed to national standard? >> tanks for asking that question. the first thing is if massachusetts was his own country, and we do like the top of pisa. montgomery county workgroup was its own country it would be near the top of pisa. so to say like the sky is falling because our scores are low is not right. it means the data needs to be disaggregated. part of what the problem is an american is the area that point down our pisa school are areas with incredible poverty. so for me to say the way to solve these problems is to change the curriculum all around the country. stop poverty, right? white going to break a good school system in montgomery county because of poverty and baltimore? it doesn't make any sense to me. i think there's a question of culture a lot of the country at the top of the pisa ranking our

confusion, cultures. young's out has been great in saint america, don't do that. they have 1000 plus years of taking the entrance exam. there's a whole culture, hundreds of years of preparing for standardized tests, and there's some real a lot of unhappy kids, a lot of fearful kids, all the creative, bright kids get crushed or exit the system. i believe in freedom. i believe in happy children live in encouraging children to be inventive and creative. so yes, i think there's a cultural thing, and i don't want to adopt singapore or shanghai or china's testing culture goodwill of the same political system -- don't have the same political system as them. i don't want that. >> so you mention baltimore, and

l.a. kind of examples of poor communities caring about their education, how that's a good example to support localize control. let's assume all of these poor communities around america have like a literacy and education, pedagogy and also like a political efficacy to kind of move the system but what if they don't have like a fiscal power to get high-quality education or the teachers to teach their children? how do we address that situation? >> that's a a good question. what we do about communities that don't have resources? do you think they have the will to have a good education system? assuming they have good, the will to have a good education system, i'm supportive of redistribution for education. i mean, i come from a liberal household that part of the original element and secondary education act, i think the notions were noble where it's

hard to get a good education if you're in a a poor school distt to get into things to help poor communities i think that's a good thing. the way that title i started was a pretty noble thing. the problem is you kept putting more and more strings. if you get somebody come if your parents give you an allowance and say here's 20 bucks, responsible, though. that's one thing. did they give you $20 and say aye want an itemized list of everything you spend it on and by the way can only buy it for standardized tests, that's not showing respect for freedom or respect towards other community. i think it on entrance education act has really shifted into this punish culture that think is a mistake. let me keep trying to answer this question. governor cuomo, he had an education bond, and it was

called the smart schools bond. and the smart schools bond, how can you refuse that? the smart schools bond. anyhow, it was primarily to lock unities to get wi-fi, to get enough computers to do common core testing. so i was following the issues at the time. a superintendent told me nick, there's no way mount vernon, a portrait in westchester can ever for to do common core testing. he told me that in the spring here that summer governor cuomo announced the smart schools bond act that enable schools around the country, , or the state, to get computer systems for testing. testing. so i wrote an op-ed and tried to look people to what was happening. so it was $2 billion, and what else could we done with $2 billion, right? we could reduce the class size. we could've done more field

trips. we could've done more internships. we could of got more summer jobs. we could pay teachers more, making more attractive profession to bring in high-quality educators. instead it was a boon for google and other tech providers. there are two sides to this story. i am acknowledging there are two sides to the story but for me i would rather entrust communities and say listen, how do you want to spend your money? how do you think is best would educate your children? and then go from there. >> how do you think we should practically go about getting more local control for schools? like how do we implement that? >> well, the first thing is there's got to be a demand for it. if there's not the demand, it won't be enough of a movement,

and in new york we had test refusal movement and the test refusal movement has set up to one-fifth of families in newark state refuse the, cortés. that was a clear signal that parents cared about was happening in education. every student succeeds act has several provisions that from my reading are trying to stop the test refusal movement. that's a huge mistake. that's going to really analyze kids whose parents are paying attention and think there's a problem. what do we do? well, gosh, that's of the question. i think the first step has to be there has to be political will and i think policy entrepreneurs will comment say we listen to the people who want local control, here are my ideas. that's the next conversation we need to have. the first conversation we need to have right now is we want local control, and what it would

be precise, that's the next conversation. >> why don't we take one or two more. >> you had alluded to it, like prior but i but i was wonderinu could speak more about like a child psychology i guess in of like how people are functioning or responding to this common core thing. like kids and teenagers are as stressed out as if ever been on standardized testing. seems you could make the connection like this incredible stress that people are going under for these tests is like inhibiting that success the comical are supposed to be like introducing, that stresses like inhibiting their success. i was wondering if you could like speak more about how children are proceeding, court and how they are handling that? >> that's a great research project, and hope somebody does it. anecdotes are not data, but we

could still tell anecdotes. a lot of people so should meet a sing the kids are stressed out of their minds. there there's this one mother in upstate new york trisha, and with friends and should one kid who went to school before common core, and her younger son as now going through common core. she can see both and she's absolutely livid about with the school day has become, and the fact is that if you like cut recess from schools, i think there's been data that shows height increase. kids need recess to burn off the feed. feet. you basically guaranteeing more fights. i'm in right of contact with parents all around the country, and nobody fights the comic or because they think it makes the kids education better or makes their kids happier. a lot of parents are like this is outrageous, kindergarten should be about playing with your hands, discovering the world and now they're doing this

early literacy thing. my kids are not happy. i started with my family and i will end with my family. we had to push our kids to school, and that's a miserable way to send junk people to school, to trick them, , to control them, to push them. it's no good. >> one of the criticisms in the past is that we tend of these test which is throwing money, like block grant. if we remove the test and the streets-we make sure the fines that we do give to education are being spent wisely and efficiently? >> okay, so the question is how do we make sure the money is spent wisely. so here's the trade-off, okay, if you say listen, in washington, d.c. we need to control all of the liber spirit we need to see that the money is been spent wisely. the only we can do that in standardized tests. the only way that you can do it

is, you could say look, new york's reading scores are going with up and in alabama the reading scores are going down. you need to have the same test and the same standards to get the comparable data and then you can see okay, since in the consoles to alabama to pull up the reading scores. that's the dream of centralized education control, using the levers in washington, d.c. to do things. you will make the whole american education system about a narrow range of testable skills. so the plus is you got a person in d.c. who gets to control the levers. the downside is all these other things, valuable things are being cut out of the curriculum. my view is there is a role for the federal government to supplement educational spending but for me the accountability mechanisms based on standardized test scores distort the whole educational process and are not

worth it. so i mean, i'm going to leave on an answered the question about what you do, i mean, about how you get to spending without the control. that's a puzzle for political science. we haven't solved that problem yet, but for me just they federal accountability provision, like no child left behind, according to the education of skull is a death star of american education, and i agree with her. >> i like to thank you all for coming and to thank you for your questions. let's give another a round of applause for professor cambio. [applause] >> so all the appear if you have any questions [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some of the books in published this week.

>> look for these titles and bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> the two main measures if you're trying to figure out come as a political scientist compose the most influential justice. the one thing in my saints who writes the most majority opinion in the significant cases? this is a political science major, the cases that make to the front page of the new times. as long as metaphysical paper i think will use that measure. by that measure scalia was at the most influence of justice. he was in a lot of those majorities, a lot of concern decisions but he didn't like them. often they were written by others. >> and he was quite senior for a long time so you would think he would get those opinions assigned to him, except the

chief justice either rehnquist or roberts may be didn't think they would be able to hold on to five? >> sorry. either it was what he is time to say or how was trying to say it but didn't let them get to five. the other would you might measure influence is by looking at who is of the swing justice, who was the one whose vote is the fifth vote, that is required and i think that ties into life scalia didn't write a lot of these opinions because in order to get o'connor or justice souter or kennedy on board to write something is going to appeal to them, and he was not going to compromise what he felt was right way to decide the case in order to get the fifth vote. he literally says that in a birkenfeld. under conventional maybe he wasn't a pleasure but as i suggested earlier he was very influential but to his sheer force of his writing and his methodology he kind of mood the

middle of the court, got people talking statues in the constitutions in a way they were before. you can't write a brief today trying to construe what a statute means without first going through the words of the statute, what addiction might say, the tech shows approach,, and then you go on to legislative history but there's a different talk about things and he to go back to the eclectic way that these things would go, where courts would go on for five or ten pages about what a statute meant while according the statute. he was her influential but not on the convention when we talk about influential justices. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country.

>> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome mrs. sheila tate. [applause]